Rasterisation

Abstract: The RealityEngine graphics system is the first of a new generation of systems designed primarily to render texture mapped, antialiased polygons. This paper describes the architecture of the RealityEngine graphics system, then justifies some of the decisions made during its design. The implementation is near-massively parallel, employing 353 independent processors in its fullest configuration, resulting in a measured fill rate of over 240 million antialiased, texture-mapped pixels per second. Rendering performance exceeds 1 million antialiased, texture mapped triangles per second. In addition to supporting the functions required of a general purpose, high-end graphics workstation, the system enables realtime, “out-the-window” image generation and interactive image processing.

Abstract: Current affordable architectures for high-speed display of shaded 3D objects operate orders of magnitude too slowly. Recent advances in floating point chip technology have outpaced polygon fill time, making the memory access bottleneck between the drawing processor and the frame buffer the most significant factor to be accelerated. Massively parallel VLSI system have the potential to bypass this bottleneck, but to date only at very high cost. We describe a new more affordable VLSI solution. A pipeline of triangle processors rasterizes the geometry, then a further pipeline of shading processors applies Phong shading with multiple light sources. The triangle processor pipeline performs 100 billion additions per second, and the shading pipeline performs two billion multiplies per second. This allows 3D graphics systems to be built capable of displaying more than one million triangles per second. We show the results of an anti-aliasing technique, and discuss extensions to texture mapping, shadows, and environment maps.

Abstract: With fast 3D graphics becoming more and more available even on low end platforms, the focus in hardware-accelerated rendering is beginning to shift towards higher quality rendering and additional functionality instead of simply higher performance implementations based on the traditional graphics pipeline. In this paper we present techniques for realistic shading and lighting using computer graphics hardware. In particular, we discuss multipass methods for high quality local illumination using physically-based reflection models, as well as techniques for the interactive visualization of non-diffuse global illumination solutions. These results are then combined with normal mapping for increasing the visual complexity of rendered images. Although the techniques presented in this paper work at interactive frame rates on contemporary graphics hardware, we also discuss some modifications of the rendering pipeline that help to further improve both performance and quality of the proposed methods. CR Categories: I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architecture—Graphics processors; I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Bitmap and frame buffer operations; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques— Standards I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Color, Shading, Shadowing and Texture

Abstract: A deferred graphics processor which includes deferred shading, a tiled frame buffer, multiple-stage hidden surface removal processing (Fig. 5), Phong shading (14000), subpixel anti-aliasing, and texture- and bump-mapping (12000).